According to this Reuters report, the Taiwanese company Pegatron Corp. is being accused of forced overtime, low wages and the use of underage workers. Pegatron is one of several companies that works in Apple's supply chain for various iOS devices. So who is accusing the company of such horrendous practices? The U.S.-based China Labour Watch (CLW) - the same watchdog group that unearthed violations at another company that manufactured iOS devices in China (Foxconn).

According to a new report filed by the group Pegatron has 86 labor rights violations - 36 of which the group calls unlawful and 50 other violations the group thinks are unethical. These violations took place across three Pegatron factories between March and July this year.

Apple spokesperson Carolyn Wu claimed that the company had no knowledge of Pegatron's practices, and that Apple's own independent surveys from June of this year found no serious breaches.

CLW gathered the information from 200 employees it surveyed.

"Apple has not lived up to its own standards," CLW executive director Li Qiang said in the statement. "This will lead to Apple's suppliers abusing labor in order to strengthen their position for receiving orders. In this way, Apple is worsening conditions for workers, not improving them."

For its part, Apple said it would investigate the matter further. Last year Apple had a similar issue with Foxconn, who had been accused of many of the same practices. Some of the poor working and on-site living conditions caused several employees to commit suicide.

Comments

What else is new.. these are east asian manufacturing companies, they're well known for this and yet we still hire them. why? cause they're cheap.

not that i condone such, but until we somehow convince the major corporations to stop outsourcing to these cheap manufacturing facilities known for their notoriously bad working conditions and lacking safety.. well... its hardly news anymore :/

As to the denial of knowing this stuff. its called "Plausible deniability", a fairly old tactic where they just take what the company tells them is true, stick to a standardized tour, and ignore any possible obvious flaws or checks they should otherwise be making themselves. This way when the obvious does happen, they've already made billions, and they can pretend they had no idea, because technically they didn't!